7 Practical Steps to Improving Your Domain Authority

I want to begin this post by answering the question “What is Domain Authority”? Read Understanding Domain Authority

We’ve come to the very question this article attempts to answer: How do you improve your DA? Improving your link profile is a crucial issue that I’ve addressed in detail before.

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At the most basic level, to have a good link profile, you have to do the following two things:

• Get rid of bad links.
• Gain good links.

Let’s deal with the first one — getting rid of bad links. This is pretty straightforward. You request the removal of these links, and if that fails, you disavow them. Hope that is clear enough?

Gaining good links? Realistically, you have two options to engage in gaining some good links.

Option 1
Engage the services of SEO experts/agency that has proven relationships with good websites and writers who can secure high-quality and legitimate back links for your site. This is a good option, but it is expensive and has some risks.

Option 2
Create a site with high value contents/information that attracts links by virtue of its uniqueness, people willingly link to your site because of the value it carries.

Can you change your site’s domain authority? Yes, I am convinced there are certain things you can do to change and improve your domain authority. And that is the reason for this post.

1. Build a well organized internal linking structure

Internal linking are said to occur when a link in an article takes you to another related article on the same website. In other words, interlink all your posts to have better on-page SEO which results to an improved domain authority.

When doing your internal linking, consider the followings:

Do not overuse a given anchor text and do not use same anchor texts.
Set an optimum number of links within a post.

Maintain a balance between your external links and internal links within a page.

2. Write unique/valuable contents

When you want to prove your authority, you need unique content that no one can beat on the subject matter. This means content that provides value to the readers. It is not as difficult as you think, start to brain storm now.

Avoid duplicating content issues. In case you have a post that is somehow similar to an existing one or is an updated version of it, use the rel=”canonical” feature to point out search engines to the source of the article.

3: Ensure a Good SEO is in place

You must understand that SEO of your site is a core requirement of a domain authority improvement effort.

Make sure you attend to all the technical aspects of SEO of your site; this is absolutely important and it is a foundation. It may not be sweet to optimize your robots.txt or map out a URL structure, but without these important features, you won’t have effective SEO.

According to Moz, to improve your DA, you must necessarily improve your overall SEO and that includes all the details that SEO considers, these are: site structure, site navigability, site breadcrumbs, site URL structure, site meta tags, header tags, word count, keywords, alt tags, etc.

Make sure that your SEO is up to par before you go further in the pursuit of higher DA.

4: Regularly Remove Dead Back links

It is never going to be easy, but it’s worth the effort. You’ve got to remove your dead back links. Every now and then, you should dig into your link profile, find the spammy links, and get rid of them asap.

There are plugins that can help you identify and fix broken or dead links, these links are like toxics to the overall well being of your site. Remove them before they kill your site.

I have come to discover that most webmasters are cleaning their website off dead links as regular as they should. Sure, I see webmasters engage in clean-up with a vengeance, but it’s only after they’ve experienced the slump of an algorithm penalty or the heart-stopping experience of a manual penalty.

5. Start Marketing Your Content

Content marketing is the new game in the blogging world. You need to market your content to increase its reach.

The more eyes on your content, the more will it help the readers and hence more link backs, more social shares, and eventually more authority your site gains.

6. Increase User Friendliness Of Your Site

Remember, with very good SEO, effective social sharing, and even awesome content and marketing, all these will amount to nothing without audience.

If you want your site to attract readership, you have to do all you can make your site user-friendly. No one would like a site that takes long to load. Keep your site load time under 2-3 seconds or even lesser.

Do not jam-pack your site with ads that pop up now and then. And increase white space by removing clutter from your site. Let your navigations be well organized

7: Having Done all, Be patient

If truly you have done or you are doing exactly what I’ve explained in the above steps, your DA will certainly rise.

One factor that doesn’t get a lot of notice whenever discussions of attaining higher DA is the domain age factor.

Frankly speaking, the older the domain, the higher it gains authority. I examined the link profile of a website and discovered some historic domains. These historic domains had high DA levels.